Inside your smartphone: analyzing the rare-earth elements (2024)

FAQs

What rare earth elements are in smartphones? ›

Electronics and Circuitry

The content of copper in a mobile device far exceeds the amount of any other metal. Copper conducts electricity and heat and comes from the source mineral chalcopyrite. Tetrahedrite is a primary source of silver.

Metals are what make smartphones so “smart.” An average smartphone may contain up to 62 different types of metals. One rather obscure group of metals—the rare-earth metals—plays a vital role. These rare-earth metals include scandium and yttrium, as well as elements 57–71.

Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) is used to measure the concentrations of rare earth elements (REE) in certified standard reference materials including shale and coal.

Apple products - and the iPhone in particular - contain very small amounts of, yet a wide variety of, rare earth elements: yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, europium, terbium and dysprosium, according to the article.

Unlike older CRT technology, which relied on magnetic fields to form images by deflecting electron beams - modern screens, including those on phone screens, utilize LED displays and electricity to create images. Therefore, a magnet on a phone doesn't pose any danger.

The crystals in your phone or computer are the same as the ones in a quartz watch. They provide the clock speed for the processor. The MEMS are Micro Electro Mechanical Systems. That is microscopic moving parts etched out of silicon.

The mainboard lines, chips, IDE interfaces, PCI Express slots, other interfaces, processor sockets, and so on are often covered in gold layers of a few microns thick. Besides that, the SIM card we use also contains gold.

Gold is used in mobile phone circuit boards because it is chemically stable and conducts electricity.

What is unique in every phone? ›

A device ID is a unique, anonymized string of numbers and letters that identifies every individual smartphone or tablet in the world. It is stored on the mobile device and can be retrieved by any app that is downloaded and installed. Apps typically retrieve the ID for identification when talking to servers.

The full list of heavy rare earths is dysprosium, yttrium, terbium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium and lutetium. Dysprosium, yttrium and terbium are considered critical in the heavy rare earth metals group as they face low supply and increasing importance in the development of clean energy technologies.

Many rare earth elements (REEs) have unique spectral properties at visible and near infrared wavelengths (VNIR: 400−1400 nm) that make them directly detectable with reflectance spectroscopy.

Gadolinium, lanthanum, and terbium give the screen its glow. A cell phone's display contains several rare earth elements. These elements are spread out widely in Earth's crust, so they're hard to mine. The phone's liquid crystal display (LCD) screen holds small amounts of yttrium, europium, and dysprosium.

Rare earths add color and light

Using an energy source like a laser or lamp, scientists and engineers can jolt one of a rare earth's f-electrons into an excited state and then let it fall back into lethargy, or its ground state. “When the lanthanides come back to the ground state,” she says, “they emit light.”

Rare-earth elements (REEs) are used in the components of many devices used daily in our modern society, such as: the screens of smart phones, computers, and flat panel televisions; the motors of computer drives; batteries of hybrid and electric cars; and new generation light bulbs.

"Rare-earth elements (REEs) are used as components in high technology devices, including smart phones, digital cameras, computer hard disks, fluorescent and light-emitting-diode (LED) lights, flat screen televisions, computer monitors, and electronic displays.